Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

One minute was enough, Tyler said, A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

I say let me never be complete, I say may I never be content,I say deliver me from Swedish furniture, I say deliver me from clever arts, I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth,I say you have to give up! I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may!

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.

If we can forgive what's been done to us . . . If we can forgive what we've done to others . . . If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.